– Why don’t I just tie a length of rope around one of the plum tree’s branches? my father said. You can swing on that.

– Very funny, my sister said, flouncing out of the room.

Her constant carping and pleading obviously prompted my father to do something about it, because a swing (of sorts) arrived one Saturday morning.

I was first aware of it when my father carried an armful of long red metal tubes into the back garden. He unceremoniously dropped them onto a rectangular piece of mud, went off, and then returned with an armful of long blue metal tubes, which he dropped next to the red ones. He then went off and returned with two lengths of chain, a rectangle of wood and a plastic bag of things that jangled. Read more…